Not for me. Overall, I thought the premise was interesting, but as someone who isn’t a gamer, this book felt too technical for me. I couldn’t keep up with certain details. I think maybe there needs to be a sort of middle ground maybe.

Trans Rights Readathon (book 2 of 5) review📖 A literary fiction book about queer friends + late 90s setting + video games sounded like the perfect read to me! Overall I’m kind of on the fence about it but there were both things I liked and things I didn’t.

Let’s start with what I didn’t like so we can save the best for last!

My main complaint was that it was a bit too long. The story is almost 500pgs so there were definitely parts that read slower or felt a little too drawn out. I think it could’ve been 100pgs shorter and still kept it essence. I also wish the early part of the story was longer! I wanted to see more of the three women in their 90s youth making video games and wish we could’ve gotten a deeper feel for them and their lives during that time. That first part of the story goes so fast! I didn’t mind the technical game jargon at the start like other reviewers, I think that bit will be hit or miss with people.

Now for what I liked! I loved how much depth all the characters had. This a very much a character driven novel with emotions and introspection being the core of the book. They each showed a different experience of being a trans woman and the many ways that impacted their lives. The books has a lot of neurodivergent and mental health representation as well.

As I said earlier I wished there was more of their early lives because I loved the early internet culture bits at the start. The IRC chat was making me soooo nostalgic. I was in a very active IRC for a few years during the hardest time in my life and it was so meaningful to me and kept me afloat💜

Overall I did vibe with what the book was trying to do but I feel neutral about the execution. This is very much a book you’ll have to read for yourself to see how you feel about it. It comes out April 1st! Thanks to NetGalley and Soho Press for a copy of this book, it was such a uniquely written tale!

I really enjoyed this story of queer nostalgia for a deeply specific moment of internet culture, when chat rooms and text-based communication ruled. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow combined with I Saw the TV Glow.

4.25 out 5 stars.

In A/S/L, Jeanne Thornton crafted a story that is not only deeply rooted in nostalgia but also one that lingers for years after you read it.

The prose is magnificent and it untangles, questions, tries to explain, the very complicated feelings Abraxa, Sash and Lilith have.
From childhood friends on the internet to three very distinct trans women, their paths are bound to cross again, as they live within the same city without knowing it. As the story unfurls, we get to peek into their lives and their minds and how everything still connects them, in some strange way, to that massive fangame they made when they were much younger.
It was sometimes hard to follow how the characters felt and reacted to everything they were going through. That iniatially bothered me - particularly while reading Abraxa's POVs - but as I kept reading, I found that I was allowing myself to enjoy their way of processing their thoughts as something that's not always making sense or that's not always following a clear reason followed by explanation logic. So, overall, I think what Jeanne Thornton built on a narration standpoint is stellar and palpable. It made me feel invested and I wanted to know all the little details. It made it feel real.

If you love character-driven stories, trans women coming into themselves and video games, you'll cherish A/S/L deeply.

Thank you Soho Press, Jeanne Thornton and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC. This review is entirely my own and honest opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for this ARC.

I loved the integration of games to the daily lives of our main characters and following their journey as teen online friends who are trying to code their own game, and in their adulthood.

The only thing was that the book was a 100 pages too long, but otherwise beautifully written!

I wanted to love this novel so bad! The synopsis sounded incredible, but I just couldn’t get into the overall story. I wanted to feel nostalgia while reading it, but the writing style wasn’t very good. I love novels about computers games but this one was such a letdown. The characters were interchangeable and I lost interest halfway through. Such a disappointment.

The book's description pulled me in but the writing didn't meet my expectations. Difficult-to-read chat logs (I'm not sure if this was intentional or corrected pre-publication) with a lot of lingo that will be unfamiliar to many readers (even for those who were teens in the 90s) and overly descriptive prose really made this book drag.

Video game themes are not all successful and this one really doesn’t grab attention. There is too much detail about game specs for this reader.

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for this ARC!

In A/S/L we follow the story of three trans women, starting with them as teeangers still trying to figure themselves out in the 90s, as they work on a video game together, and ending with them as women in their 30s in 2016.

As someone who was born in 2001 I can’t say that I know particularly much about what the internet was like back then, but I’ve always been fascinated by the culture that was created by the numerous niche websites, blogs and forums you could find back then, now of course largely replaced by well-known social media sites, so I really enjoyed that element of this book. I found the chatroom conversations a bit hard to follow at times, especially since I was very much unfamiliar with that style of messaging one another, but I’m sure if you are older than me and grew up with that sort of thing you will have a grand nostalgic time.

In the same vein I unfortunately also didn’t understand absolutely anything related to the game they were creating, which had me struggling quite a lot in the earlier parts of the book, as I hadn’t expected for there to be quite as much lingo, so to speak, as there was. However this eased up significantly later in the book, so even if you are like me and have no clue about anything video game related, and even less so video game culture in the 90s, you can still have a good time if you stick it out.

I think Thornton did an absolutely fantastic job of giving all the characters whose POV we got to read from a distinctive voice, you could show me a paragraph without any identifying information and just from the character’s style of speaking/thinking I could immediately identify who it is. And not only did all the characters each have a distinctive voice from each other, I also generally found the way they thought to be very unique.

To me the way mental illness and neurodivergence were represented in the characters was well done in a way that was uncomfortable and painful because of how relatable it was. This was actually one of the elements of the book I struggled the most with, as I could often see myself in the characters and their thought patterns and actions, which is a bit of a disconcerting experience when you have internalised biases towards said issues. However, this is also one of the reasons I would say that this is an important book, because it shows these issues without really pathologising or naming them, confronting the reader with them in a way that causes discomfort that I would describe as necessary for one to reflect on one’s own biases and perceptions.

Of course I also liked the way the trans experience was shown here. I feel that often trans characters are kind of “forced” to be at least somewhat put together and “respectable” to a wider audience, but for a group that is so often the victim of violence and exclusion from opportunities it is only natural to often be forced onto the messier side of life. I really liked the way that the effect each character’s transness has on their lives, on the jobs they have, the friends they keep, the romantic and intimate relationships they attempt is represented here. I think this could be quite comforting to read for other trans (and cis!) people who have found themselves forced to the outskirts of society.

Overall I would say that while I can’t recommend this book to everyone, there certainly is an audience for this. If you like video games and older internet culture, messy trans women and the ways the world beats one down, then this is the book for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Soho Press on April 1, 2025.

Full Rating: 4.25 stars rounded up

Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L is a deeply evocative novel that pulses with the ache of queer longing, the glitchy hum of '90s internet culture, and the fractured beauty of trans survival. Spanning both 1998 and 2016, the book traces the lives of Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—once gender-questioning teens crafting a video game called Saga of the Sorceress in an online chatroom, now estranged trans women navigating the messy terrain of adulthood.

Thornton’s prose captures the jagged edges of trans becoming: at times dreamy and poetic, other times raw and disjointed, reflecting the precarity of forging an identity under systems designed to erase you. The book hums with the tension between fantasy and reality—between the worlds we build to survive and the ones that threaten to break us. The teens’ game-building is rendered with reverence, positioning video games as queer art forms—portals into self-determination, into worlds where bodies and identities are mutable, magic. This creative defiance carries into adulthood, where the characters remain tethered to their shared past, still reaching for that elusive sense of home.

Abraxa is a tempest of restless movement and fierce imagination, clinging to the belief that Saga of the Sorceress was something more than a game—that it was, and still is, real. Lilith, burdened by the Boy Scout creeds of loyalty and self-discipline, seeks safety in cisnormative approval yet yearns for something wilder. Sash, craving connection, funnels her emotions into storytelling and financial domination, grasping for intimacy in commodified spaces. Each woman aches to be seen—not as a symbol or spectacle, but as a person worthy of love, creation, and survival.

If the novel stumbles, it’s in its pacing; certain chapters drag, and the structure occasionally feels unwieldy. But the emotional core remains potent. Thornton refuses tidy resolutions—because trans lives are not tidy. Instead, she offers something more radical: the possibility of rebuilding, together.

📖 Recommended For: Lovers of introspective trans fiction, stories exploring online communities and digital subcultures, and readers drawn to narratives about queer friendship and creative world-building; anyone nostalgic for late '90s internet culture or interested in the intersections of gender, technology, and art; and fans of Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Identity and Becoming, Queer Community and Longing, Creativity as Survival, Digital Worlds and Self-Determination, Power and Vulnerability in Relationships.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Transphobia (severe), Homophobia (moderate), Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Domestic Abuse (minor), Physical Abuse (minor), Toxic Relationship (minor), Sexual Content (severe), Fire (minor), Abandonment (minor), Drug Use (severe).

This will be one of my favorites of the year, and probably of the 2020s. Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L is so, so beautiful, at once heartbreaking and heart-healing.

In 1998, something happens that causes video game “corporation” Invocation LLC to disband before ever releasing a single game.
Twenty years later, the three women who made up the company, now adults, lead entirely separate lives but find themselves drawn together by the game they never finished and the sorceress at its heart.
I loved this— beautifully written and a really interesting and honest explorations of growing up online.
I loved the different styles of writing too. Each character has a slightly different narration style and their voices come through so vividly. Chapters are interspersed with emails, forum posts, game walkthroughs and ASCII art. A/S/L feels like it contains worlds— I went to look up Mythic Knights after reading it and was so shocked that it didn’t really exist.
Recommended for anyone who likes trans literary fiction or writing about video games.

DNF @ 22%
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

The easy comparison here considering this is a story about following friends who make a video game together is ofcourse tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I’d say if you found that one “too technical” on the gaming side though, this executes that ten fold. You get chat logs, diagrams, and pretty detailed explanations on a game level from our mcs. I do think all of this together caused the story to become a bit bloated and unfortunately no matter how many times I tried to pick this back up it just wasn’t sticking for me. Granted the commitment to the lit/tech blend is what makes this unique and that’s tough to pull off in a general sense (where the mere mention of a video game gets people claiming a story gets “too gamey” i.e TATAT), let alone as detailed as this is (at least to the point where I had dnf’d). I do like the overall idea behind this though, the rise of stories following how people are shaped and find identity online is one i find really interesting as it’s something I experienced myself. + while this wasn’t for me, I can see people really loving this.

Thank you to Soho Press and NetGalley for the ARC!

This book is totally unique and an excellent addition to the body of queer/trans literature. It will easily appeal to fans of video games and LGBTQ+ readers, particularly older millennials.

I love the idea of this book and I tried very hard to read it fully but I simply could not complete it. The formatting generally irritated me and it seemed like it needed one more round of editing before publication. I really hope this happens because I can see this being a good book with more work.

I got this an arc on Netgalley and it will come out in April. I reckon this is a book that will speak to a lot of queer and trans people. It speaks to certain shared experiences. Unfortunately the writing style was simply not for me. I had a hard time following along.

**A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton** is a novel that follows three queer friends–gamers and coders–who meet in the late 1990s. They forge strong friendships and find ways to survive by chatting online and co-creating games. Although the group seemingly falls apart over time, they reconvene 20 years later.

The story features three main characters: Lilith, a trans woman and loan officer; Abraxa, a nomadic trans woman; and Sash, a part-time cam girl. The narrative picks up after these friends have become adults. Despite their different approaches to life, they remain connected by their past love of gaming.

This novel is also a story of survival. As teenagers, the characters meet on early internet forums, engaging with strangers and using gaming as a means to escape their realities while forging connections. As they come of age, we see how they repeatedly rely on these coping strategies. However, the strategies that help them survive trauma may not always be beneficial for thriving in their later lives.

I believe fans of *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow* by Gabrielle Zevin, *Beautyland* by Marie-Hélène Bernino, as well as authors like Torrey Peters, Nicola Dinan, and Emily St. James will appreciate this book. Thank you to NetGalley and Soho for the ARC.

4.5 stars

A/S/L is if "Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" went trans queer and carried a bunch of trauma. It has its ups and downs and at times it was a good read. Thank you to Soho Press and Netgalley for the eARC in exchange for feedback.

The story starts in 1998 where you're introduced to text based games of the time and how three queer, online friends / business partners were trying to write a game together. They've never met IRL and you learn about each of their experiences through alternating POVs and online chat communities. You learn about how video games seem to seep into all of their lives. It jumps to 2016 and you're caught up on where each of them are in their lives and how each has evolved. In a way, they're all still stuck in the past and living with regrets.

Throughout this all, the author lays bare the misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia experienced by the queer community on a daily basis. All the rules they have to make for themselves as a means of coping. All the traumas, of which there are many. Hopes, dreams, fears. Nostalgia distorting the past. Their near-infatuation of a video game series and how it seeps into their everyday lives, tying all their loose strands together again.

My biggest critique would be that it needs some editing down. Too verbose, often times aimless. Abraxa's chapters specifically can be that way. POV's aren't mentioned for large sections and one just disappears. Disinterest crept in for me at one point. The balance is just not right. But then you get near the end and there are moments that are beautiful. It's a shame it takes forever to get to the letter. Overall, I still liked its social critiques and its intersection of life and video games, but I also found it frustrating for many reasons.

Expected publication date is April 2025.

Fun read. I wasn't as connected to the characters as I wanted to but I still think they were nicely written. The story wasn't for me but I do think their is an audience for it, probably one that likes video games a lot more than me and who clicks with the writing style more.

This doesn't come out till spring, but I'm recommending that you get your pre order in for this now. You'll get a story that features chat logs, using the internet to try on new identities for yourself and the people you meet and bond with when you're young and how they shape you, and a great look into using the framework of a fan video game you made with three others online when you were teenagers that shapes your life even decades on, and even haunts you to some degree, since it's unfinished. This was a hell of a read, and I loved every minute. Pick this up this spring when it comes out.